knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a... Now up at @knightcolumbia.org - Cosma Shalizi and myself on "AI as Social Technology." It says that AI models are really a technology of social mediation that allow humans to connect with thoughts of other humans. Short-ish thread with major points follows.

New open-access historical sociolinguistics of Persian from the Achæmenid period onward. www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

Excited to announce, w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social, @ari-holtzman.bsky.social & Emily Wenger, that we won a Schmidt Science AI grant to build AI systems for storytelling + narrative world making. How do you get AI to tell immersive, believable, interesting stories? www.schmidtsciences.org/2026-humanit...

How can generative AI better support human creativity, without limiting it? If you have thoughts, we invite submissions to our ICML workshop on Generative AI, Creativity, and Human-AI Co-Creation 📍 July 2026, Seoul 📄 Submit by: April 24 (AOE) 🔗 Submission link: openreview.net/group?id=ICM...

I guess I should've asked this a few weeks ago, and not the day before I teach the module on "machine translation" for my Translating the Caribbean course, but here goes: What's your favorite contemporary critical essay on machine translation coming from the humanities?

📣 New historical data visualization! "How Fast Was the Mail?" is an interactive map showing how long information took to travel across the US between 1882-1908: cblevins.github.io/mail-time/ +

The article notes that declines in international students are fueling the budget crisis. That’s entirely pain inflicted by the Federal government. But the solution is not directly responsive to that; I sincerely doubt those lost international students were coming to study classics. 1/

The Experimental Humanities Lab led by Fritz Breithaupt seeks a postdoc to help launch a research hub at the intersection of narrative, empathy, cognition, & AI. PhDs in lit studies, cog sci, psych,+ who combine narrative insight w/empirical skills encouraged to apply: apply.interfolio.com/183656

TBH I wish I knew @dasmiq.bsky.social was coming to town earlier, so I would have replaced a session on modelling or a session on dynamics in my #NetworkAnalysis class at ENC with the EPHE seminar organised by Peter & Daniel @psl-univ.bsky.social #digitalhumanities #ArtificialInteligence #AI

One of my favourite pseudo-Diogenes aphorisms comes from this papyrus: "Diogenes the Cynic philosopher, seeing a small town with large gates, said shut the gates in case the city escapes!"

and with a link : www.prairie-psai.fr/2026/03/18/l... because the best proofreading happens after posting 😂

#jobklaxon 10 postdocs available at @psl-univ.bsky.social in #AI. Working language: English. Btw. #digitalhumanities also happen under the AI hype these days, so get in touch and walk by this very building on your way to work. Join me in being #touristatwork #juniorProfInParis

Bursary deadline for this summer school course is April 7th! 👇 tell everyone you know. ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

Man the talk was cool and totally worth the walk! Thank you @dasmiq.bsky.social for sharing your experiences and to Peter Stokes (not on bsky) and Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra (not on bsky) of EPHE @psl-univ.bsky.social for organising! I have learned a lot! 🤓

It’s official. My project with @mistralai.bsky.social and @replyai.bsky.social at the @oeaw.bsky.social to develop LLMs for ancient languages, starting with Greek, has gone public. The AI system is complete, stay tuned for the published results! www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/oeaw...

Thrilled to collaborate with @grigorievna1812.bsky.social and contribute to assembling the open digital corpus of historical Greek, the largest compiled to date, for this project under the leadership of @dasmiq.bsky.social.

I'm in Rabat, Morocco attending #EACL2026 and enjoying tea! I will present our recent work – comparing how new words emerge in books/articles and on social media – at the LChange workshop: aclanthology.org/2026.lchange...

People see that for translations. But when you raise the same issue for transcription, somehow people don't care... AI is great, but come on, we need to be a bit more careful in the humanities and remember to be a little more rigorous...

Serving on the ADHO Board & in various related roles has been one of the most rewarding parts of my professional life: a small enough community that I've come to know some amazing colleagues really well, but also international in scope and large in ambition & heart. Please consider volunteering!

Apparently you can pre-order? (Thank you @alilleybrinker.com for pointing this out!) Just be sure not to read it ha ha ha? yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

We are excited to announce our next seminar: David A. Smith @dasmiq.bsky.social (Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston) "Artificial Intelligence as an Archival Science" on Friday 20th March 2026, 11am CET. Details here 👉 almanach.inria.fr/seminars-en....

𝑪𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝑰 𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒑 𝒖𝒔 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒕 𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆? In our new #CHI2026 paper, we studied how AI assistance affects close reading poems — not just how well people interpret poems, but also the pleasure derived from close reading. closereading-ai.app #AI #HCI #closereading #humanities #culture #poetry (1/13)

So many of you have asked—happy to announce... Latin BERT v1 now available on HuggingFace 📦 Model: huggingface.co/latincy/lati... 📝 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2009.10053 Original weights, experimental repackaging—leave issues/etc. in the HF discussions #nlproc #digiclass cc: @dbamman.bsky.social

The talk is based on a paper I co wrote with @eduede.bsky.social @hoytlong.bsky.social & Patrick Sui that is accepted and forthcoming at ICLR 2026. Here's the preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.07722

(1/7) Below, I share the slides for a talk I gave Tuesday at NYU's "Cultural AI" conference. The talk was about how slippery "culture" becomes in discussions of AI. A beautiful example of this comes to hand, because another conversation about culture and AI is taking place today!

Here's the talk I gave at Duke's Society-Centered AI (SCAI) conference in Feb 2026, on "The Social Case for AI Hallucinations" — on why AI "confabulations" might actually be a resource for historical recovery. Not all AI hallucinations are errors - some can have affordances. youtu.be/p-S-KPI7YFQ?...

Exciting lecture series in Paris from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI grantee David Smith, @northeasternu.bsky.social.

My essay, "An Unexpected Influence: Photostats in Special Collections Libraries" is about what happens when libraries adopt new technologies that promise to democratize access to knowledge and revolutionize library work. It was published in PBSA. You can read it here! halperta.com/scholarship/...

Come to the first lecture at 4pm this afternoon on "Textual Criticism as Language Modeling" as we lay the groundwork for philology as LM inference. 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, Salle 26.

📢 REMINDER: We're hiring a #DigitalHumanities Scientist to join our interdisciplinary DH Lab in Rome! 🔎 Focus: Digital art history, AI & machine learning, cultural heritage data, collaborative research ⏳ April 30, 2026 🔗 www.biblhertz.it/en/opportuni...

Cultural AI felt very real this week at NYU. Outstanding conference; wide-ranging and argumentative in the best way, and full of people trying to build vocab and practices for this emerging space. Huge thanks to @leifw.bsky.social and @t-shoemaker.bsky.social for organizing it!

[Guy who doesn’t know anything about Egyptian archaeology]: This room is giving Raiders of the Lost Ark vibes

Excited to share the pre-print for a forthcoming article in NLH with @richardjeanso.bsky.social 🎉 Generative AI & Fictionality: How Novels Power Large Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2603.01220

Paris friends! Amis parisiens ! This Thursday is the first of four public lectures I'm giving on AI and philology, broadly defined: "Philological Reasoning and Computational Models." The advertisement is in French, but the lectures are in English. I'd also love to meet while I'm here in March! 1/

We have a new article with Digital Classicist Online: Towards a smart edition of Apollodorus

Paris friends! Amis parisiens ! This Thursday is the first of four public lectures I'm giving on AI and philology, broadly defined: "Philological Reasoning and Computational Models." The advertisement is in French, but the lectures are in English. I'd also love to meet while I'm here in March! 1/

If you've made it this far, you might also want to check out Amber's earlier work on media storms: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1..., or my student Ben Litterer's (@blitt.bsky.social) ACL paper on the same topic: aclanthology.org/2023.finding...

For additional details, including coding protocols, teaching resources, and side-by-side case comparisons, you can refer to the accompanying website: www.amber-boydstun.com/catching-fir...

We also discuss additional factors that can influence the course of a storm, such as journalistic gatekeeping, attention fatigue, political activism, and strategic communication online. For a more in-depth summary, please take a look at Jill's thread here: bsky.app/profile/jill... or read the book!

The book is build around a series of paired case studies -- similar events, where one became a full-fledged media storm, and the other did not -- such as the Titan Submersible Implosion vs. the Messenia Migrant Boat Disaster, occurring just days apart in 2023.

The heart of this work uses the fire triangle model (heat, fuel, and oxygen) as a metaphor to characterize the necessary conditions for an event to become into a media storm -- those stories that are so pervasive in the news that they are practically inescapable.

I'm a little late in sharing this news, but thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Amber Boydstun, @jilllaufer.bsky.social, and @nlpnoah.bsky.social, our book on media storms, "Catching Fire in the News", is now published and available fully open-access from Cambridge! doi.org/10.1017/9781...

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

Wrote a slightly more detailed guide on how to do this with your own collections/materials: danielvanstrien.xyz/posts/2026/r...

New article! "Toward an Ontological Representation of Fictional Characters" by @antoine-bourgois.bsky.social, me, @oseminck.bsky.social & @tpoibeau.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/chr.... Nothing fancy here — only sweat & tears. 🧵

In our new preprint, we explain how some salient features of representational geometry in language modeling originate from a single principle - translation symmetry in the statistics of data. arxiv.org/abs/2602.150... With Dhruva Karkada, Daniel Korchinski, Andres Nava, & Matthieu Wyart.

I gave a talk at the Google Privacy in ML Seminar last summer on privacy & memorization: "Privacy Ripple Effects from Adding or Removing Personal Information in Language Model Training". It's up on YouTube now if you're interested :) youtu.be/IzIsHFCqXGo?...

We also show that we are far from done, specifically for a complicated language like Old French. But we (1) defined the issue, (2) propose a first solution that enables pre-annotation of larger dataset and (3) offer an alternative to less trustable models that go beyond ATR.

We release: 📚 4.66M silver training samples 🧪 1.8k gold evaluation set huggingface.co/datasets/com... 🤖 ByT5-based model → 6.7% CER huggingface.co/comma-projec... Try it here 👇 huggingface.co/spaces/comma...